About a month ago Emanuel (ehaupt@) started his term as a portmgr-lurker but due to a lack of spare time he preferred to step down from the program to focus on his real job. Hopefully Po-Chuan (sunpoet@) was ok to start his term earlier and replaced ehaupt as a portmgr-lurker. Here is a short introduction to get to know him a bit better.

Name

Po-Chuan Hsieh

Committer name

sunpoet

Inspiration for your IRC nick

“sunpoet” comes from “晴詩”, a nickname in Chinese.

The first character means sun/sunny and the second character means poem/poetry.

TLD of origin

.tw

Occupation

Student, sysadm

When did you join portmgr@

I wish I could join portmgr@ after my portmgr-lurker term.

Inspiration for using FreeBSD

Simplicity and convenience.

Ports collection is the most attractive part.

Who was your first contact in FreeBSD

Chin-San Huang (chinsan@)

I asked him to take my PRs via gnats-aa.

Who was your mentor(s)

I was mentored by Philip M. Gollucci (pgollucci@).

What was your most embarrassing moment in FreeBSD

The first time to break INDEX. Of course it happened more than once.

Boxers / Briefs / other

Boxers

What is your role in your circle of friends

Listener

vi(m) / emacs / other

vim

What keeps you motivated in FreeBSD

I use FreeBSD. I love FreeBSD. And I want to make it better.

Favourite musician/band

It would be a long list, e.g. Aerosmith, Lara Fabian, Vitas, …

What book do you have on your bedside table

Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think

coffee / tea / other

Tea

Do you have a guilty pleasure

Icecream?

How would you describe yourself

I’m shy

sendmail / postfix / other

postfix

Do you have a hobby outside of FreeBSD

Reading and travelling

What is your favourite TV show

House of Cards

Claim to Fame

I don’t know if I have any. Maintaining 700+ ports and keeping them up to date?

Unless you have been hiding under a rock for the past ten years, you have
likely heard about Martin (miwi@) Wilke. Simply put, Martin is the
developer who contributed the largest number of commits to the ports tree:
more than 20,000 commits since 2006!

Unfortunately for us Martin decided to step down from duties at FreeBSD in
order to save time for both his growing family and real job. Let us wish him
all the best in his personnal and professional endeavors, and of course, let
us all thank Martin for his tremendous work and commitment to FreeBSD!

Let us welcome Emanuel, our second lurker who will learn a bit more about portmgr duties for the next four months and who started by answering our usual questionnaire.

Name

Emanuel Haupt

Committer name

ehaupt

Inspiration for your IRC nick

Same as my default UID so that people can find me.

TLD of origin

.ch

Occupation

System Engineer

When did you join portmgr@

Beginning of november 2014 as a lurker.

Inspiration for using FreeBSD

It’s been my primary server/desktop OS since years. I always liked the
documentation and found things generally easier to achieve than with
Linux. I was also fascinated by ports. At the time I was manually
downloading solaris packages from “sun freeware” when someone showed me
ports. I think it is no surprise that I switched to FreeBSD. I always
found the community to be very friendly and helpful. Finally with pkgng
I feel the same sense of excitement all over again.

Who was your first contact in FreeBSD

Pav Lucistnik (pav)

Who was your mentor(s)

Roman Bogorodskiy (novel)

What was your most embarrassing moment in FreeBSD

Can’t think of any particular one. In general breaking things tends to
be embarrassing.

Boxers / Briefs / other

Boxers

vi(m) / emacs / other

Mostly nvi but more and more vim.

What keeps you motivated in FreeBSD

pkgng, poudriere, the friendly and helpful community, ZFS, geli,
stability of the OS to name just a few.

What book do you have on your bedside table

Arnaldur Indriðason – The Draining Lake

coffee / tea / other

Coffee!!!

Do you have a guilty pleasure

Reddit and coin mining.

How would you describe yourself

Sysadmin, traveller, adventurer, motorcycler, dog person.

sendmail / postfix / other

sendmail.

Do you have a hobby outside of FreeBSD

I am a passionate motorcycler. I love riding my motorcycle in the more
mountainous regions of Europe. After a long day at work you often see
me on my motorcycle riding towards the sunset. I also have a
fascination for the nordic culture and literature. I’m taking Swedish
lessons since 2011.

Claim to Fame

Driving from Oberstaufen, Germany to Amman/Jordan using no highways in
3 weeks in a 20 year old Audi A4. Maintaining 195 ports and keeping
them all up to date and working.

What did you have for breakfast today

Swiss-Muesli with Coffee

What sports team do you support

None.

What else do you do in the world of FreeBSD

Porting and maintaining ports that I’m interested in.

Any parting words you want to share

I’m just glad to have the opportunity to work with so many highly
skilled people on the FreeBSD project.

From now on and for the next four months the FreeBSD ports team is pleased to welcome two new portmgr-lurkers: ak@ and ehaupt@. Alex was the first to answer our questionnaire so let’s get to know him a bit better.

Name
Alex (Олександр)

Committer name
ak

Inspiration for your IRC nick
Committer name

TLD of origin
ua

Current TLD (if different from above)
es

Occupation
Independent contractor

When did you join portmgr@
Just a lurker atm, 2014-11-01

Blog
None

Inspiration for using FreeBSD
I tried linux first.

Who was your first contact in FreeBSD
itetcu

Who was your mentor(s)
eadler, itetcu. Thanks, guys.

What was your most embarrassing moment in FreeBSD
I broke the INDEX, twice.

vi(m) / emacs / other
vi(m)

What keeps you motivated in FreeBSD
It sucks less.

Favourite musician/band
Ritchie Blackmore/Queen

What book do you have on your bedside table
A Night in the Lonesome October (The Halloween was a few days ago).

coffee / tea / other
Tea, green.

Do you have a guilty pleasure
Sometimes I watch The Muppets instead of doing something useful.

How would you describe yourself
Too lazy.

sendmail / postfix / other
exim

Do you have a hobby outside of FreeBSD
Tons. The bikes, skydiving, amateur Martial Arts, poetry.

What is your favourite TV show
The Muppets

Claim to Fame
Nothing so far.

What did you have for breakfast today
Fried rice with mushrooms

What sports team do you support
I don’t support teams, I play when I can (regrettably, not that often lately).

What else do you do in the world of FreeBSD
Fiddling with portlint, xorg, zfs filestorages, various odd jobs.

It all started with this commit from Jordan Hubbard on August 21, 1994:

Commit my new ports make macros
Still not 100% complete yet by any means but fairly usable at this stage.

Twenty years later the ports tree is still there and actively
maintained. A video was prepared to celebrate the event and to thank
all of you who give some of their spare time and energy to the project!

Last month, our beloved Canadian Thomas Abthorpe decided to step
down from his portmgr-secretary position. While I suspect this is secretly
related to his pool of Canadian jokes having dried up, the official reason is
that Thomas wants to focus more on his private and professional lives for the
moment. Needless to say, the whole ports community is in mourning.

Thursday morning, 5 AM, I couldn’t sleep. I thought I could use the time before
work to do something useful, so I started handling a few PRs for FreeBSD. After
a couple of commits, a warm shower, and just before heading to work, I quickly
browsed through my irc backlog and suddently got very sad: someone was angrily
asking why bug reports were being ignored for such a long time, pushing for his
own PR to finally be given some consideration.

Thinking about it in the bus to work I realized that this guy was right to
complain: when a bug is reported it should ideally be fixed right away. Still I
was feeling sad because being on the other side of the fence I know how much
dedication volunteers put into FreeBSD, but I was not sure everybody was aware
of this. I had to find something to express this dedication.

That’s how the idea of the monthly dashboard came: simple figures that can tell
a whole story. See for yourself with this dashboard that can be found in portmgr
monthly report for June 2014:

Monthly dashboard

Number of messages to portmgr@: 564 (+53%)
Number of commits on ports: 3,717 (+17%)
Number of ports PRs closed: 873 (+25%)
Active ports committers: 147 (+10%)

Isn’t it amazing? Nearly 4,000 updates on the ports tree and nearly 900 problem
reports closed in a single month!

That’s a tremendous amount of work done by our committers. Take Linux for
example: with more than twice as much contributors during the same period four
times less commits were applied to the Linux kernel than to the FreeBSD ports
tree [1].

Those figures pay tribute to our committers, and I am pleased to see that the
activity keeps growing. I personnally believe there has never been a better time
to start contributing to the FreeBSD ports tree with all those new features
currently being introduced. So come and join the party!

From July to the end of October two new lurkers will have the opportunity to get insights into FreeBSD portmgr internals, namely William Grzybowski and Nicola Vitale. William was the first to answer our interview so let’s get to know him a bit better.

Name

William Grzybowski

Committer name

wg

Inspiration for your IRC nick

my name initials

TLD of origin

.br

Current TLD (if different from above)

Occupation

Software engineer

Blog

None

Inspiration for using FreeBSD

Stability and simplicity

Who was your first contact in FreeBSD

I don’t recall, too long ago!

Who was your mentor(s)

culot, jpaetzel

What was your most embarrassing moment in FreeBSD

Breaking INDEX, but hey, who ever didn’t?

vi(m) / emacs / other

vim

What keeps you motivated in FreeBSD

The passion of everyone in the zoo about it. You can very easily see a
guy angry by someone’s else commit like stealing candy from his son

Favorite musician/band

AC/DC

What book do you have on your bedside table

book? what is that?

coffee / tea / other

coffee, beer (but real beer, no corn!)

How would you describe yourself

Calm and mind-centered

sendmail / postfix / other

postfix

Do you have a hobby outside of FreeBSD

Play soccer, gym

What is your favorite TV show

Fringe

Claim to Fame

I was mentored by culot and I survived! Just kidding, I have none, I am a joke!

It is my pleasure to introduce Steve Wills, the newest member of the portmgr team. Steve has done a tremendous work on the ports tree, especially in the field of testing and quality. Here is a short interview to get to know him better.

Name
Steve Wills

Committer name
swills

Inspiration for your IRC nick
Boring, it’s my userid.

TLD of origin
.us

Current TLD (if different from above)
Same.

Occupation
Sysadmin.

When did you join portmgr@
2014

Blog
Used to have one, use twitter more now (@swills)

Inspiration for using FreeBSD
Simplicty and learning.

Who was your first contact in FreeBSD
Can’t recall, it was ages ago.

Who was your mentor(s)
pgollucci

What was your most embarrassing moment in FreeBSD
Trying to migrate Ruby default version from 1.8 to 1.9 and having to roll back.

Boxers / Briefs / other
Heh, question assume survey taker is male, which I am, but I think we need to
work on diversity (but not in that “hey, let’s work on diversity and get some
women” way, but more in that we make something everyone wants to use)

What is your role in your circle of friends
The FreeBSD user.

vi(m) / emacs / other
vi(m)

What keeps you motivated in FreeBSD
New users, new committers.

Favourite musician/band
I listen to a decent variety of stuff, but I suppose the thing I come back to
most is NIN.

What book do you have on your bedside table
I have an iPad by my bed, which I bought to read, but mostly I browse news on
it.